8 Additional Notes. 



latter of which has also four or five vai'ieties. These nouns therefore 

 may properly be terrned the abbreviation of sentences; as the con- 

 junctions and prepositions are termed by Mr. Tooke the abbreviation 

 of words; and if the latter are called the wings affixed to the feet of 

 Hermes, the former may be called the wings affixed to his cap. 



III. Adjectives, Articles, Participles, Adverbs. 



1 . The third class of words consists of those, which in their sim- 

 plest form suggest two ideas; one of them is an abstracted idea of the 

 quality of an object, but not of the object itself; and the other is an 

 abstracted idea of its appertaining to some other noun called a sub- 

 stantive, or a name of an entire thing. 



These words are termed ADJECTIVES, are undeclined in our lan- 

 guage in respect to cases, number, or gender; but by three changes 

 of termination they suggest the^ secondary ideas of greater, greatest, 

 and of less; as the word sweet changes into sweeter, sweetest, and 

 sweetish; which may be termed three degrees of comparison besides the 

 positive meaning of the word ; which terminations of er and est are 

 seldom added to words of more than two syllables; as those degrees 

 are then most frequently denoted by the prepositions more and most. 



Adjectives seem originally to have been derived from nouns sub- 

 stantive, of which they express a quality, as a musky rose, a beautiful 

 lady, a stormy day. Some of them are formed from the correspondent 

 substantive by adding the syllable ly, or like, as a lovely child, a war- 

 like countenance; and in our language it is frequently only necessary 

 to put a hyphen between two nouns substantive for the purpose of 

 converting the former one into an adjective, as an eagle-eye, a May- 

 day. And many of our adjectives are substantives unchanged, and 

 only known by their situation in a sentence, as a German, or a Ger- 

 man gentleman. Adjectives therefore are names of qualities, or parts 

 of things; as substantives are the names of entire things. 



In the Latin and Greek languages these adjectives possess a great 

 variety of terminations ; which suggest occasionally the ideas of 

 number, gender, and the various cases, agreeing in all these with the 



